


Interface

by honezuki



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Masturbation, Power Dynamics, Robogasms, Robot Kink, Unintentional (and Intentional) Technobabble Dirty Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-10-31
Packaged: 2017-12-31 02:15:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honezuki/pseuds/honezuki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A chronicle of Wheatley’s most satisfying hack to date, and the strangely titillating shenanigans that follow. Originally written in December 2011 as a Tumblr Portal Secret Santa present for ginchimera, who asked for core!Wheatley/Chell sexytimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interface

"And I guess it was trying to rip out some wires for its nest, but it happened to splice something together by accident, because a second later, bam, everything was back online! Except, finding myself mid-disembowelment, I sort of came awake screaming."

Blue portal. Orange portal.

"Well, as you might imagine, _that_ got her attention, and she drop-kicked me into the incinerator without a second thought. Now here's where it gets interesting: as I was plummeting into the abyss, still screaming at the top of my lungs—are you listening? this is the good part—I remembered that I've got this absolutely _mad_ electromagnet. And mind you, this thing is so powerful that it once ruined the passcards of every employee in the entire facility. Complete and total mayhem. Not that it was my fault."

Orange portal. Blue portal.

"Anyway, I figure I'm about to die, so what's the harm in engaging this thing? And it bloody worked! So there I was, stuck to the wall, halfway down the incinerator shaft, no way of moving up or down… right. You aren't listening. That's fine. You're still running. Busy running. Carry on."

This is how conversation generally goes between Wheatley and the lady he's escaping with.

She pays him precious little attention while they're running around together; in fact, an outside observer might assume they just happen to be going the same way, even as he directs her every step from above. Something in the way she moves, stalking around the shadowy gantries like a big cat, makes it clear she's an independent agent, beholden to no robot. Even friendly, helpful, life-savingly brilliant robots such as himself.

Maybe a cat is the wrong animal—maybe she's more like a bird. Useful things, birds: with the portal gun, she can flap around to all the places he can't reach. His envoy into the unknown. The brawn to his brains.

Although he is not entirely without brawn himself. And he'll admit she has brains, too, that much is obvious from the way she blazed through the new testing track, faster than he could persuade the panels open to spy on her—but that's not how it works, "brawn and brains and more brawn and other brains." That's not as catchy.

Still, regardless of the exact allocation of brawn and brains between the two of them, they are a team. And impossible as it might seem, their team is poised for victory—owing mostly to his two-part plan, turrets and neurotoxin, which is quite frankly the best idea this facility has ever seen.

So far, there is only one fly in the ointment: the tremor he developed after being half-crushed back in the main AI chamber.

A minor annoyance, to be sure, but he's plagued by the idea that it will crop up at just the wrong moment to ruin everything. He's tried getting his companion to scare it out of him, citing the way scientists used to cure each other of the hiccups, but as it turns out, asking someone to surprise you is not the best way to get surprised.

"All right, give it a go in ten minutes or more, when I least expect it," he instructs her as they fly around a corner together. "Sudden movements, kick something over, do whatever scandalous thing you see fit… or, here's an idea, you could pull a complex, meaningful face and say, 'Hey, Wheatley, let me tell you what I'm thinking about.' Actually, don't do that one, it might work too well and I'd just die of shock. Ha ha ha… ohhh. Hilarious."

This is something of a low blow, but without the possibility of retaliation on her part, he's inclined not to care. Sure enough, she continues tramping down the walkway without batting an eyelash.

She's got plenty of talents, to be fair—lifting and carrying things, for instance, and demolishing giant A.I. lady-tyrants, and definitely jumping—but communication is just not one of them. Through no fault of his own, her face seems not to be functioning at optimal level, and he can't be expected to tread lightly around her feelings if he can never tell what she's feeling—if, indeed, the brain damage hasn't wiped out her ability to feel altogether. He isn't a mind reader. Those virtual flashcards with the little smiley faces in the affective computing database don't tell you what to do when someone makes the wrong face, or when they fail to make any face at all.

Of course, there's also the matter of that curriculum and those flashcards being out of date. Like, a hundred years out of date.

Still, how much could have changed since then? Smiley face, frowny face, eyebrows and cheeks and tear ducts—but from her, nothing, not a clue. The first time they laid eyes on each other, when he tried to make a flash diagnosis of her condition, he did dig up the flashcard that most resembled her default expression. It's labeled "constipated". He's not going anywhere near that one.

He watches her through the reinforced glass between his management rail and the Employee Daycare Center, patiently drawing her along from exhibit to exhibit with the beam of his flashlight.

Her shoulders heave up and down once; he squints through the dusty beam to catch it. A sigh: exasperation, boredom, relief. Tick. Is it his imagination, or is each of these emotions diametrically opposed to the others? Have to pay more attention to the sighs.

Ever since he broke her out of the testing track, he's scrapped the original flashcard file and started building a set of his own in an attempt to keep track of her unique brain-damaged body language. On occasion, she provides the bare minimum of visual cues: a longer blink than usual, a sharper turn of the head, a faint line between her brows.

It's all quite tiresome, but beggars can't be choosers. This is the last human. And, to be honest, one of the best so far. Resilient. Just keeps going, never stopping, never wearing out.

Except just now.

Just now she's leaning her forehead against the reinforced glass, staring at him out of hollow, dark-circled eyes, looking for all the world like the vindictive ghost of an insomniac.

"Okay. What's the hold-up? You are creeping me out, to be honest. Like, a lot."

Her eyelids flutter almost imperceptibly (fatigue, maybe? possibly scorn? or was that supposed to be a cheeky wink?) before she turns back to the science fair tables, dangling the portal gun against her thigh. _That's_ got to be some sort of visual cue—she's never lowered the thing for a second since she got her hands on it.

He resists the urge to pummel her with exhortations to run along—they are a proper team now, having worked together to sabotage the turrets, and teammates have to support each other.

"I know you are tired—" this is a shot in the dark; he knows no such thing for sure "—but we're almost there. Do keep in mind, this is pretty urgent. Imagine if you stopped on the way to shut off the neurotoxin and fell asleep in the infirmary up here, and while you were asleep, she figured out our location and flooded the place with neurotoxin. Aww, the irony! You'd be in for a good long nap then, if you know what I mean. Dead. You'd just wake up dead. Or rather, wouldn't wake up, that's my point."

The motivational speech does nothing. She continues at the same pace, lugging her boots one after another across the tile, until she reaches the last of the science fair exhibits.

"Oh, there it is now," he says, catching the dim outline of a door on the opposite wall and flipping his flashlight beam at it. "The infirmary. Lovely, big, inviting bed in there. Which is another thing I don't understand—encouraging children to abandon their posts and sleep on the job. You can bet if I'd tried that, I'd have been… fired from the infirmary and relegated to a crap job in the enrichment center, actually. Which is indeed what happened. So…"

As he's talking, she tears herself away from the monstrous potato plant to slip through the last hallway and approach the infirmary door, fixing it with a haggard stare. Finally, some progress. He follows her, switching off his flashlight with a hushed sigh of relief.

A flickering fluorescent panel lights the keypad next to the door; she mashes her hand onto it, pressing random numbers with her knuckles, then starts prying around the door frame with her weak little fingernails. Atrocious hacking technique. Where does she expect to get with that?

"Yep… nothing we need in there," Wheatley says, hoping to steer her away gently. "Not gonna take her down with thermometers and gauze. And like I said, stopping to rest is just asking for trouble at this point."

Abandoning the fingernail approach, she hoists the gun and starts shooting portal after portal at the crack in the pocked metal. Each shot deflects and cascades down, making miniature fireworks in alternating orange and blue.

"That's a charming pyrotechnic display there, very pretty, but can I remind you that we are on a bit of a tight schAAAAUGH! Don't— you aren't supposed to point that thing at people! Much less fire it. Have you even read the manual? STOP! Will you— just stop it! What do you want me to do?"

That seems to have been the right question. She lowers the gun, staring at him, then flicks her eyes sideways to the door for half a second.

"You really need to get in there, do you?"

He sizes up the door. This kind is quite solidly constructed; he won't be able to use his signature "face hack" technique on it. The number pad is a possibility… but he has a better idea.

"Hey, you know what? There should be a core receptacle somewhere! Like, right next to this place! Uh, although that would mean coming off my management rail again, and not even for a good reason. Shoddy design, really, with this door. Inconvenient. If they made the bloody infirmary easier to open, maybe there'd've been a second annual Take Your Daughter to Work Day, huh?"

Looking entirely unimpressed with either his plight or his attempt at a joke, she leans against the door.

There's no arguing with someone who won't talk to you. This must be what is known as "taking one for the team."

"Ought to be easier than last time," he says, stalling for time—maybe he can talk himself into this, or her out of it, before one of them gets hurt. "At least we know I'm not gonna die. Probably. So how are you on the catching situation? Up for it this time?"

She plants herself under him and holds the gun up, her zombie stare making a quick little detour that is not quite an eyeroll.

"No need for sarcasm, I'd like to see you fall this height with nary a boot to save you. Well, I wouldn't _like_ it—wouldn't wish this on anyone, really." This talking-himself-into-it thing isn't working; he tries to wheeze out his remaining tension in a long sigh. "Right, are we ready? One. Two. Thr—"

And there goes the tremor. He sparks—a quick, tiny skip, a millisecond or less, but he already knows he's headed straight for the floor again.

"—ee. OH GOD CATCH ME CATCH ME."

He can see her flinch, and the gun wobbles the wrong way, and then he's hurtling through empty space and glancing off the prongs of the energy field manipulator. It pulls at his side just a little, enough to make the inevitable pratfall slightly less unbearable.

"Thanks for that," he says, rolling his eye at the ceiling. "What happened to your razor-sharp reflexes, mate?"

The gun puckers him up into its energy field. This is the best part, being chauffeured around the facility, cradled midair in his own little pocket of gravity, even if it is just a few steps across to the other wall. He gives his gyroscope a spin for the hell of it, sending his plates whirling on themselves in every direction—his reward for leaping selflessly into the void.

Mid-whirl, he catches her skewing one corner of her mouth to the side in a gesture he's marked down as the rough equivalent of "whoops".

"That's fine, you tried, you tried. I understand. That was both of our faults."

He rights himself, giving her a proper once-over now that he's at eye level. Both of them are looking somewhat the worse for wear. She's managed to accumulate odd smudges of grease somewhere in the factory, not to mention the oil slick of homemade grease that always emerges on test subjects when they've been awake long enough. She's also got ominous twin trails of dried blood on the heels of both hands, though he can't tell from what. It's certainly not a far cry from how he found her, unshowered and uncombed for god knows how long—the real difference is how much her face is dragging. Not to mention her reaction times.

"And you know what," he says decisively, "I take it back, I am glad we're doing this. Because if you're going to be dropping stuff when we face her, dropping the gun, tripping over yourself like a buffoon and so forth… no offense, love, but I wouldn't bet on you. Well, maybe I would, just to show my unconditional commitment to this partnership. Because I am. Unconditionally committed. Anyway, let's do this, take me on over."

Sensing their approach, the hidden panel opens up… or at least it tries.

This is one foul receptacle. Vines and potato fronds snake up its hinge, choking it to a halt halfway open; the mechanism whirs and jerks for a second before sagging into a defeated silence.

Rolling forward to the very edge of the gravity pocket, Wheatley squints at the smudgy control panel, its four red buttons coated in grime. The handlebar-restraining clamps waggle ominously back at him. Scabs of rust cover the Aperture logo, and the plug itself, shedding sparks as it struggles out of the wall, inspires no more confidence than the rest of the affair.

"You're absolutely sure you need in that room? Because, uh, I think I'm gonna get a disease from this," Wheatley says. "The chances of this killing me have just skyrocketed."

He flips his eye back over to catch the utter lack of concern evident on her face.

"Can't take a nap out here in the corridor instead? No hope of respite?" Even as he speaks, she angles the gun and him with it, lining him up to interface with the monstrosity before them. "Didn't think so. Oh, well. Plug 'er in, then, and if you would turn around, thank you very— _WARRRRGH!_ "

The moment that wretched plug touches his port, the clamps seize his handles with unnecessary force, bashing him against the wall. The bolt on his backside scrapes along the rusty face of the panel, emitting a hair-raising metallic shriek.

Plates skittering out of control, he strains to pull his handles from the clamps, but they respond in kind, pinning him back even more firmly. And yet for all their enthusiasm to get him into position, he still isn't in full contact with the plug.

That's just as well, because something about that feeble connection with his receiving socket is just _very, very off_.

 _Something_ is coming from it, a _something_ so far outside the bounds of protocol that he can't even put a name to it. The _something_ forks through his brain like lightning, a bright zing darting from circuit to paralyzed circuit. His optic input signal is edged with the popping of white static; he senses the shapes of her face, of the gun, of the room behind her, but none of them coalesce into a meaningful picture.

A second later, he's staring directly down the barrel of the gun-shape as its gravity field engages, tugging him forward. The weak invisible knot of suction ebbs and flows over him; the clamps hold fast.

Just when he thinks he's about to burst, something squishy closes around his upper handle and yanks him away from the wall with alarming strength. He feels the clamps bending, shuddering—and with an indignant hiss, they release him, and he's catapulted forward in a flailing mess of parts, bouncing straight off another squishy surface and then faceplanting, for the second time in as many minutes, into the ground.

His wailing speech synthesizer—how long has it been _wailing?_ —tapers off and dies. A ringing silence falls, save for the internal flurry of his system and the sound of his eyeplate crunching as he rolls to and fro on the gritty tiles.

Then the speech synthesizer clicks on again, thank god.

"The things I go through for you, lady," Wheatley says, somewhat hoarsely. As he rolls face-up again, he sees the portal gun inches away on the ground—and then her, slumped against the opposite wall, looking worse than ever.

He can feel a ticker-tape of words coiling up behind the synthesizer, wound tighter and tighter with every cycle of his still-frantic CPU, until it snaps and comes reeling out:

"I tell you, you'd better have the best sleep of your life in this bloody infirmary, first that maniac wadded me up like a sheet of paper, then the thing with the bird, and you won't stop dropping me, and now this, I think I'm in shock, honestly I do, might never recover and then where would you be? Nowhere, that's— oh, for the love of— _is the door even open_?"

The door is still shut.

"No, of course it's shut. I didn't get anywhere near the lock. Too busy getting mutilated half to death. We have advanced no closer to the infirmary, the neurotoxin generator, or ultimate freedom; and, as an added bonus, I am now a traumatized shell of a person and will probably soon die of hack-related causes. You can bury me in the shade of that majestic tree of potatoes. Oh, wait! I just remembered—was that you trying to scare the tic out of me? Because if so, very nicely done, I have to say. A bit _too_ nicely, perhaps."

The tic in question goes off, throwing a spark.

"Oh, and there it is. Well, that's… Swing and a miss. You tried."

As the whirring of his processors subsides, she lurches to an upright position and eyes him.

Such a pitiful thing, empty-handed, swaying slightly on the spot. He feels a little pang of magnanimity. This team is doomed if they don't get their act together, and it's his responsibility to keep things moving.

"Listen, it's okay that you dropped me again, really," he reassures her. "It certainly wasn't any worse than what happened on that receptacle. Which, you may have noticed, was NOT normal."

Granted, interfacing is hardly a comfortable thing at the best of times. He's never sure he's delivering the relevant data packets and nothing but. Inconvenient things tend to just slip out when he talks; code is no exception, and he's left wondering what private information he's just blurted out to the neighboring panels and whether it's going to get him blacklisted. (Because that would not be unprecedented.) Not to mention this receptacle is outfitted with a parallel data plug, which entails sending information over several channels at once—and if there's one thing Wheatley is terrible at, it's multitasking.

Still, this is something else. He shoots a glare at the receptacle. Its clamps hang limp and motionless, as if daring him to try again.

"You're absolutely sure we have to go this way, then? You can't figure something out with that portal gun?"

He knows better than to wait for a response, but in the guttering half-light, her stare grows more liquid than usual—puppy-dog-eyed, one might say—her only movement the tiniest arch of the eyebrows.

She's been through the ringer, this one. She does deserve a rest. They both do.

That isn't what convinces him to try again, though.

Nor is it the irresistible call of the hack, the knowledge of how _close_ he was to securing the connection, the possibility that he'd finally earn a real look of admiration from her—if he's honest, none of these things are what convinces him, either.

It's that _something._

The niggling memory of that onslaught of pure, tingly sensation, flooding his receptors, blinding him to all else, all from an insolent plug that has no business sending him a single byte.

"Yeah, I know what you're thinking," Wheatley says, making a throat-clearing sound. "Master hacker like me, giving up after one little thumping. You want me to give it another go. That's fine. Fair enough. Let me just say, though, there are other avenues we could explore. Say, cracking the code on the number pad." That, at least, has no means of crushing him against the wall. "We'd have to do it manually, but don't worry, I'll tell you exactly which numbers to press. You ready? One, one, o—hey!"

She leans over and closes her meaty fists over his handles again. Unfortunately, those same arms that ripped him from the receptacle now seem to have the dead-lift load-bearing capacity of a plastic fork. The flimsy things can't get him more than an inch or two off the ground.

"Oi, why don't you just use the OH GOD!"

Preparing to heft him up, she's put one hand on his casing.

It's like touching a hot stove—his entire frame jerks. The outermost plate spins frantically as it tries to get away from her skin, but that only makes it worse, dragging the hand along his entire circumference like a rusty nail on a chalkboard. She snatches it back at once.

"Okay!" he shrieks. "Okay. Listen, what you just did is… not wrong, per se. But bear in mind that outside of the insulated handle bits, I do have a proper tactile sensor system, and it's not used to human hands—" how long has it beensince any human was close enough, or alive enough, to touch him? "—so just take it easy with the _groping_ , would you?"

Her hand descends on him again.

They're not large, her hands, especially considering the total surface area of his hull… but man alive, the disproportionate breadth of his _awareness_ of those points of contact. What he knows to be the merest, gentlest pad of her warm flesh is like getting slapped with a massive slab of 98.6° steak.

With a gritting effort, he holds his casing awkwardly still as she heaves him up into her arms, bracing him against the soft rise of her chest.

Lots of interesting sensations happening today.

"All right," he sniffs. And before he can recover, before he's figured out how to attack the hack, before he can even finish giving his permission—she jams him back on.

***

"Ahh—"

The handlebar clamps twitch feebly, grazing against his handles without grabbing them. Much better. And there it is again, the _something_ , and he can't stop himself from giving a little murmur of satisfaction as it clusters around his port, peppering him with tiny, shivery shocks.

Gathering all his available resources, he throws them at the lopsided connection, trying to batter his way through. There simply isn't enough of a signal, and it's too slippery. This is a hardware issue, no doubt about it. One or two bent connector pins, he thinks—not that this explains the _other parts_ , but the pins are what he'll have to overcome to reach the lock.

If he could just get the angle right…

He pitches back and forth on the plug, but succeeds only in increasing the crosstalk between channels, the signal leaping unevenly from pin to pin.

God, it's difficult to focus.

The situation has been assessed, he decides, and that's all anyone could really ask, and there's nothing wrong with taking a moment to let the rush of sensation work inside, carrying him where it will.

Letting his eyeplates quiver down, he listens to the data coming through. Without the clamps driving him further and further onto the plug, it's less of a deafening thunderbolt, more of a… tingle.

By definition, receptacles are meant to receive information. Not this one: no, instead of waiting obediently for his command, this one is sending out a little stream of numbers. They don't mean anything, don't add up to anything, don't appear to be any sort of cipher—but they are _wriggly_ somehow, fanning out just beyond his reach, making him want to laugh breathlessly, to twist and stretch his plates and handles.

But as his handles go drifting blissfully upward, they stutter over some sort of alarming rough spot, and he snaps them back down again with a yelp.

Some warped part of the receptacle must be grinding at a strange angle with the rods of his motion platform. Can't complain, though, because the prickle this produces is _enthralling_ , and he finds himself flexing his handles up and down, up and down—

"Ohh, wow, that's—"

And then a terrible realization smacks him, and his eyeplates fly open again, and sure enough, there she is, inches away— _watching while he's hacking_.

The speech synthesizer skips, giving out a number of choked gulps, each more embarrassing than the last.

The sight of her face so close to his, her eyes so _naked_ —suddenly he's panicking, practically vibrating on the plug, and he gasps at her:

"Pull me out, PULL ME OUT!"

She doesn't move. Her eyes have shifted, are now glued to the panel next to him.

She isn't even looking directly at him, and she's got him dying, bawling, squirming around on this plug. The stream of numbers, its fidgety energy so agreeable a second ago, now only feeds his sense of hysteria; as if from a distance, he hears his own voice boil over, getting louder and louder: "I said PULL ME OUT! Hack terminated! What are you doing? HELLO HELLO WHAT ARE YOU DOING? If I may mention what you _aren't_ doing, you aren't _listening to me!_ "

She kneels down out of his range of sight. He jerks, rotating his faceplate a full turn to follow her, but the bloody receptacle has his case tethered, limiting his range of motion. All he can see is her ear, a few wisps of her hair, her one cocked elbow, all laced over with the bright stars of static still bursting at the edges of his vision.

What could she be doing with the panel, besides pressing the four mystery buttons inlaid there, which nobody in their right minds would ever press?

Oh.

"WAIT. If you're doing what I think you're doing, do _not_ do it. Stop— _oh god stop—_ "

He knows her finger is on the first button before the command comes zooming through the panel. The receptacle door slams shut into his face once, twice.

 _Clang._ "Ow!" _Clang._ "OW! Ha… hahahaha!"

Where the hell did that laugh even come from? Getting smacked in the face isn't normally his idea of a good time, but everything feels tickly and dopey with that number feed still shimmering through his circuits, and once the first "ha" gets out, the rest of them tumble over each other to join it, his plates lurching in time with each one.

This hack is a carnival of madness. It's hardly even a hack anymore, it's just him flapping and moaning and giggling all over the place like a damn fool. Will it never end?

"Okay, seriously now—"

Predictably enough, she jabs at the second button. Nothing happens.

"I'm telling you, don't _—_ "

The third button jerks the clamps back to life, flailing against the panel—they don't go for his handles, but their banging around is quite unnerving enough.

"Okay, enough!" he bawls. "None of this is helping!"

The last big button is nestled right next to him. He can sense her hand passing within millimeters of his case, the tiny hairs on her arm standing on end as if there's an electrical charge crackling in the gap.

He braces himself for an agonizing death…

And quickly, smoothly, the stick ejects him. He drops into her lap, panting.

"Oh… that one did help. Well done."

***

She balances him on her knees, both of them facing the receptacle, as they wait for his humming insides to calm.

"This hack is really something, isn't it? Ha ha," he laughs weakly, not daring to crack his eyeplates. "Drama at its finest. The kind of story they'll be telling in the factory for ages, an uphill struggle for the forces of good. Well, er, not—not a struggle, I would say, I'm not struggling. It's just time-consuming. And this receptacle is such a bratty thing that I'm getting a certain itch—or a moral obligation, really, at this point—to make it submit to my will. Shut up and obey. Bend it over and wipe the smile off its face, as it were."

What on earth is he _saying?_

"Okay… deep breaths."

She shifts on the ground, tucking her feet under herself. Her thighs are twin knobs of sinew beneath him—must be what riding a camel feels like—but at least in this position, he doesn't have to meet her eyes.

He can still feel the vector of her gaze searing into him, more brain-rattling than the cumulative sum of the physical abuse he's endured today. After all those times obediently turning around, why would she choose to start watching him now? Totally rude, unnerving, one might even say _nasty_ , but…

Without meaning to, he flexes his plates out the tiniest bit.

He could almost get used to it.

Call him crazy, but it just seems to resonate with the electrifying weirdness of the entire day—the little numbers, the faulty plug, her pushing those buttons all in a row… everything about her, actually, and fleeing through the facility with her, the strangest, quietest human of all.

The best human, for what it's worth. His teammate. His friend.

Weird, too, how she's not bothering to use the device to handle him anymore. It lies abandoned on the tile at her feet. She really does seem incomplete without it—smaller, more vulnerable, without the gleam of machinery to temper the dull, mushy surfaces of her human physique.

She appears to have forgotten about his insulated handles as well, instead resting her bare hands on his hull. One of her thumbs rides the lip of the hole in his side. He can practically feel the shape of the whorls on her fingertips.

Is this a human thing? Humans communicate through touch, but he's never been trained how to touch _with_ humans, only how to talk _at_ them. If her fingerprints are telling him something, it's falling on deaf ears.

Could it be a teamwork thing, then? Offering up her hands as a team asset?

Now there's an idea.

Wheatley has always worked alone. That's how it is when you're a maverick, a self-taught, self-employed loose cannon. That's also how it is when nobody can stand working with you. And also when everyone is dead.

Nothing _wrong_ with getting a helping hand, though. Nothing to be ashamed of. After all, they're a team, and teammates help each other, pressing helpful buttons whether you like it or not, and teammates trust each other… to the point where they feel comfortable staring at you like a giant creepy doll while you're slogging away, apparently.

He revolves his inner casing, sliding his optic plate up to peek at her.

"Um, before we proceed, I've got to ask you something."

At that moment, the tic goes off again. Mortified, he ducks one handle in front of his eye and addresses a spot somewhere to the right of her chin.

"It's a hardware problem I'm trying to overcome with this plug, a couple of bent connector pins… along with some other, more nebulous issues, outside the areas of my specialty, nothing to worry about."

She looks down at him with those totally blank, hard eyes of hers, those eyes that frighten him a hundred times more than the scowls and scoldings of other humans.

"Anyway, don't mean to bombard you with jargon. The point is, I'll be needing some, er, manual assistance."

The faintest twitch of an eyebrow.

"See if you can't… like, jiggle me around a bit, yeah, to make the connection all the way," he says in a nervous undertone, blinking rapidly. "But watch your hands, will you? Because things could get a bit _weird_ and I don't want to have your finger off. And then we'll have this thing open and everybody can relax."

She smiles.

This lady's face really is _nothing_ like other faces, he thinks fervently.

She doesn't smile when he tries to ease the tension with a waggish comment—there _is_ a huffing sound she makes through her nose, which he's marked down as the brain-damaged shadow of the uproarious laughter his jokes would otherwise evoke.

She doesn't smile proudly when he does something impressive—there's a note on her version of that, too, her equivalent of admiration. It's a look where her eyes lose all their electrical-storminess and go completely calm and see-through, like a big glass of water, or a newborn sky through the lab window at dawn… and it's then that he wonders if other humans have got eyes this color, and he's just never noticed before.

When she does smile, it's at the wrong times, with the wrong eyes—wicked eyes, one might call them. Full of the parts he's missing, the things he hasn't figured out yet. Laughing _at_ , not _with_.

For all he chases after it, having her full attention is honestly something of a double-edged sword.

She holds his gaze with those thrillingly bad eyes. He tenses, ready to plunge back into the connection.

In the split second before she drives him back on, she runs her thumbs along the ridge _inside_ him, and the unholy string of phonemes that erupts from him has nothing to do with the faulty receptacle this time.

***

"Yes! Keep it up—that's tremendous…"

As soon as he feels the plug touch his port, she's rocking him around on the interface. He maneuvers his inner mechanisms as best he can against the dazzling rush of the numbers, wrestling to get those last pins into place. With the added pressure and direction her hands provide, the signal is stronger, the white noise is louder, and everything is a lot more… well, end of sentence. A lot _more_.

His handles strain upward of their own accord—that feels so _right_ , and it almost seems to be getting him somewhere, if only he wouldn't keep hitting that itchy spot where they have to come shuddering down.

Where are those bloody pins?

"Oh, come on, you big tease," he growls, not sure who he's addressing.

As if in response, she begins moving him in a slow clockwise sweep, trying to cover every possible angle. The simulated sound of his breathing quickens as he's forced over every mismatched surface, every incompatibility between plug and port.

At the upper-left corner, he hits the bent pins.

There's no mistaking it: a shock like none before goes careening through him, rippling his plates back to front. Sharp as ever, she settles him against that corner and begins to twist his frame in even smaller circles.

"There we go! Good girl. Do that."

The crosstalk reaches unbearable levels, the giddy signal tugging him from pin to pin until his consciousness is little more than a thinly-spread web trembling over the entire connection. It feels like numbers giggling at each other, and giggling at deep, primordial bits of data buried within him, and the bits of data giggling back. This is not how interfacing is supposed to go—it's so _wrong_ , but it's never been so _good_ either—and he can't stop now.

He beats his handles until they squeak, pushing them further and further each time. They want so badly to slam back all the way, to stretch spread-eagled against the wall…

Right on cue, the handle restraints give a flutter.

"Oh, _shit_ ," he groans.

There's a reason those appendages exist—to winch him into position. Without them, the link can't be completed. He might as well be across the room glaring at the lock, for all the good it's going to do.

There is, however, one other pair of appendages at this team's disposal.

Worming through the onslaught of junk data, he clings to the dim awareness of the shape of her hands still gripping his sides, holding him pinioned to the plug.

This is it. This has to be it.

Slowly, deliberately, he focuses his pupil and looks at her.

Her hands go still, and she waits, her face crystal-clear in the eye of the storm of static, looking back with a trace of that mean smile… and he has the craziest feeling that the crackling current in his system is being conducted midair along that look, grounding itself in her eyes.

"Listen to me," he says hoarsely. "Are you listening?"

She nods, one of her infrequent, staccato, hemmed-in gestures.

"Keep doing that. All right? Don't stop. I know—this is getting _mental_ —ha ha—lots of… _stuff_ … going on, lots of—sounds being made and… and so forth. But I'm telling you, no matter what I say. No matter what I do. Just don't—don't stop."

Is he even making sense? It's so hard to get his meaning through, forcing each sentence out in fragments through the filter of sparks snowing across his brain. She has a weird look—scared? confused? he can't find his bloody flashcards—her chest rising and falling somewhat faster than normal—but she nods again, biting her lower lip.

"Here's the thing. I need you to grab these bits—these handles—" he waggles them "—and pull them back. As far as you can. Can you do that?"

He feels nothing but a dull little tap, an unnerving ghost of a touch, as she grabs the insulating foam. _Too bad there's no tactile sensors in there,_ he thinks faintly.

She slams both handles back against the wall—and the stream of numbers explodes, bursting the floodgates of his conscious mind in a blinding torrent—and through it all comes a sudden override on his motion platform—one by one, each of his outer plates seizes up, clamping into lockdown.

Almost there. So close.

Behind the wall of data, he can feel the door mainframe, the smug dirty bitch, sitting there placid, waiting for his command, and he's stretching to touch it, almost paralytic with the effort. The signal is arcing like electricity, singing along that sweet jagged point of connect. Words and not-quite-words are spilling out—at this point he's not sure that actual _physical_ _components_ aren't spilling out.

"Don't stop—I'm so, so close to it—"

The static falls away like a curtain as he feels something approaching, something huge, about to probe the close-packed strands of numbers…

The tic goes off.

The circuit closes, the command slams home, and the door unlocks.

It's like all the millions of numbers frozen and balanced into some sacred perfect fucking golden vibrating equation, like he can suddenly see the fourth and fifth dimensions scientists used to talk about—

Everything is the purring sound of the tumblers disengaging, and the feel of his outer casing beating like wings, and the low, heavy groan rolling out of him—

Her warm palms gently release and hover over his handles, but he couldn't move them if he tried, he can only shudder all over—

As if feeling the force of the explosion, the door itself blows open with a bang; the plug inside him thrusts and ejects and he's catapulted into her lap, still writhing, and the flutter of her fingers on him is more than he can—

***

—more than he can bear.

How long has it been since he shorted out?

Shade by shade, he drifts out of a sheath of weightless darkness and touches down in her arms, with her heartbeat thrumming through him and her breasts pressed against him. Without meaning to, he nuzzles into her, letting his eyeplates fall closed again.

Either his parallel port is completely numb, or it's just not there anymore, and the rest of him is still ringing like a bell, suffused with a core-wide tingle of contentment. As is usually the case in these situations, his voice kicks in before any other process, pitched a full octave lower than normal by some serendipity of the reboot.

"Ohh, love, you're—let me tell you. Grade A door-opening job there. Go team. That door is _open._ Open as open can be."

Her hand pets the side of his case, provoking one last little convulsion.

"Be gentle! Don't swat. I'm fried, that's the only word for it."

Shifting to steady him against her waist with one arm, she leans over and retrieves the portal gun. From this new vantage point, he can see that she's got the toes of one boot wedged in the door, keeping it from closing.

"I think this—this could be the beginning of a beautiful thing," he sighs, happy to let her finish the job. "We could do this full-time once we escape. Imagine that—start you off as an apprentice, teach you the ropes, before you know it… you, me, kickin' down doors… er… _hacking things._ "

Equipped again, she shoulders the door open wide. Another overhead fluorescent panel hums to life as they enter, and the door slams again behind them, releasing an avalanche of dust into the light.

"We should come up with a name, shouldn't we? Okay, how's this: _Wheatley_ and _the lady_. Mysterious."

He jounces against her waist as she strides over a mangled wooden chair on the floor and drops the portal gun on the counter under a shattered mirror, shunting a load of glinting glass shards into the adjacent sink. Still feeling catatonic, he blinks lazily at the bed tucked against the wall.

The bed is… not as big as he remembers.

"Er… this is more of a cot, isn't it? Bit disappointing, actually. Still, a bed is a bed. Not that I'm any kind of bed expert. Never been in one before."

She deposits him at the foot of the bed ("Oh, brilliant! This is so nice and… stiff and plasticky and moldy. Is that a good thing? Is that what's in vogue, with beds?") and makes one hasty circuit around the room, peering into its shadowy corners.

Then she turns and stares at him, biting her lip again, with that same weird, hesitant, slightly soggy look.

Is she going to have a nap or not?

"I'm excited for your big rest!" he chirps, trying to sound enthusiastic. He's still a bit loopy, spinning and rattling, so ramped up from the receptacle that he doesn't have to fake it. "Should be great!"

She plants herself next to the pillow and peels the blackened pillowcase off, revealing a clean cushion underneath, which she fluffs with the sheet into a big heap against the headboard. Her hands tremble ever so slightly.

"Don't stay awake on my account. I bet you just want to collapse in a heap. Well, that makes two of us, because like I said, I'm fried. Just roasted. So let's get this show on the road. Rest like we've never rested before. Rest ourselves stupid. Rest until the sun comes up. Maybe not that long. We do still have the neurotoxin to deal with."

Watching him, she settles into her nest and picks apart the knotted arms of her jumpsuit.

"Not to change the subject, but did you bloody _see_ me back there? Did you see that door bust open? Don't know my own strength, I guess. I have to admit, for a moment there I didn't know how it would turn out. Pretty rough going. Pretty overwhelming."

She yanks the loosened jumpsuit down around her thighs, leaving it tucked into her boots. Legs sprawled out, heelsprings digging into the sheets, she braces herself up with one arm.

"But here we are, inside, thanks to me. So for now, you just take your little nap, don't think about the fact that we're gonna be facing the giant… murderous… sociopathic boss of the place who is hell-bent on squashing us like a couple of bugs. Just sleep tight, and… right, hate to break it to you, but what you're doing is not sleeping. Exactly wha…"

What happens next is so surreal that it knocks the natural language processing right out of him.

She's drawing her small blue scrap of an undergarment aside, revealing a little tucked-up part of the human anatomy Wheatley has never seen, and she's nestling one fingertip into it, then another, and then he's met with the astonishing sight of both those fingers disappearing _into_ her, doing what he can only call… _interfacing_.

She could turn him around, but she doesn't; she set him down facing this way, and she is making eye contact with him right now, her eyelashes falling low and her pulse fluttering visibly in the well of her throat.

It's as if she _wants_ him to watch.

Brain damage is a hell of a thing.

"You're—you're bloody _interfacing with yourself_ ," he breathes. "Is that what I'm seeing?"

The corners of her mouth begin to tug up…

"HA!" he barks. "Good luck with that!"

Her entire face slams back down in an expression that is, for once, totally unambiguous.

"I tried that, once upon a time—common rookie mistake—and believe me, it's a nightmare. Don't come crying to me when you're caught in an infinite feedback loop. Well, you wouldn't be able to cry, or come to me, or do _anything_ , 'cause you'd be caught in an infinite feedback loop. What I mean is, don't say I didn't warn you."

As he delivers himself of this wisdom, all the tense energy seems to drain out of her, leaving her to slump back against the pile of bedclothes like a deflated balloon. Withdrawing her hand, she heaves the sort of sigh usually reserved for his worst punchlines.

He has the uncomfortable feeling that he's just failed some test.

"But hey, uh, don't let me stop you. It's different for you, isn't it? Different sort of thing, biological setup—different wiring, maybe? Are you… are you perhaps getting somewhere with that?"

If he didn't know better, he would swear she's _pouting_. Whirring into an awkward silence, he ducks his inner casing to get a better look at this doily thing she's been keeping hidden between her legs.

It appears flushed, which is noteworthy—the only other parts of her body he's caught flushing, her face and hands, happen to be the most important, eloquent parts of her, the parts that merit your attention. Cogito ergo sum, this part has to be something special.

Not that Wheatley knows anything about flora, but if pressed, he'd say it looks like the sort of thing that _blossoms_ —very ladylike. A dusky pink blossom, crowned with a wisp of dark, gleaming hair.

Gleaming?

That's when he notices how _wet_ the seam of that undergarment is.

Before he has time to process this bizarre development, she stretches out her legs to enclose him on either side, tapping her heelspring against his handle. She's smiling at him with only half her mouth, which seems sinister—has the brain damage reached her facial muscles?—and her fingers are creeping back between her legs, her thumb circling around some spot at the crest of the area. Not sure where he's meant to look, he snaps his optic back up and blurts out:

"All right, let's—let's take a step back here. As _educational_ as this is, I'm still not really up to speed on what's happening, why you're making it happen, and most of all, how you are not the rising star of mechanics, what with this special talent I see you have for producing _lubricant_."

She stares; her eyes flick down to her hand, then back to him.

"You might want to think about how it makes me feel—I haven't had a detailing in bloody centuries. It's not polite, is it? Rubbing my nose in it? I mean, obviously it wasn't made for someone like me, it's doubtful you've got any friction-modifying ingredients in there, just… you've got some to spare, haven't you? That's an understatement. Loads more than you'll need. Look at that, it's everywhere."

The merest hint of a blush blooms in a butterfly shape across her nose. _Well, well, the lady hath some vestige of shame after all._

She holds his gaze, eyes softening, and the circling motion of her thumb starts up again, more slowly than before. "Absolutely soaking," he muses, unable to look away. "I can't imagine how it must feel to do all your interfacing that way—smooth as silk, so _easy_ , you can't blame me for wanting a piece of that. You're… wha—uh… are you all right there?"

Her shoulders are heaving with each breath, her white-knuckled left hand twisted in the sheets as her trigger fingers slide back inside herself. Her eyes are so wide, so pleading, that for a crazy moment he thinks she's about to _cry_ —and then she exhales and bares her teeth in a savage smile.

Wheatley remembers to blink.

They stare at each other across the bed for another long moment. A murky clank echoes from somewhere deep in the facility.

"I… I was just saying… it's a pity all that can't be put to good use," he says tentatively. "You look a bit lonely, to be honest, attempting to couple up with _nothing_ over there. I know you're a lone wolf, renegade agent, all that. But it is a bit sad. A bit lonely. And had I been built with any halfway-decent plugs, I'd do it. I'd… I'd interface with you."

In the silence that follows this announcement, he feels his pupil contract.

The words hang like icicles in the air between them. At the unadorned shock visible on her face, he can't even coax an "um" or an "er" out of his speech synthesizer.

What nonsense has he just uttered? For the love of god, she's a _human_! There are unidentifiable… _fluids_ … happening right this very moment! It was only to alleviate the loneliness of that image, he tells himself. For the sake of the team.

Worse still, his hypothetical offer is being rewarded with the most long, drawn-out, excruciating eye contact yet.

"W—wait just a—" he manages.

And then she leans forward and pulls him into her lap. Her faintly muggy, totally naked lap.

"Brilliant. This is just how I imagined my day going."

The quick huff of her laugh rocks him as she wriggles out of the jumpsuit entirely, pulling it out of the boots and down her legs.

For a moment, Wheatley is sandwiched in the V of her body as she reaches around him to yank the elastic over her heelsprings, her neck arched over him, her chin bobbing against his handle.

"God, you're so warm," he babbles into the underside of her breasts, at a loss for more pertinent commentary. "Probably a good thing. Better than being cold—in my experience, cold means you're probably dead. Don't wanna get too warm, there's a narrow range you wanna stick to, and I'd guess you're near the top of that range. Just be careful, is all I’m saying, before you pass the threshold where sweating is no longer a sufficient option and you just explode into flames or whatever. Speaking of which, I've always wondered: how does someone who's three-fourths water manage to spontaneously combust?"

She might be three-fourths water, but her body is much firmer than the column of gelatin he'd always imagined humans were like. Her belly is soft and springy, and the skin shifts over the curve of her muscular shoulders. This is good field research. He should be taking notes. Can't be bothered just now, though.

She lies back in the bed, and their eyes meet.

"So you just wanted me to sit on you, then? I reckon I can handle that."

Sitting on top of a human, rising and falling gently with her every breath, suits him more than he would've thought. He can feel his own weight acutely, pinning her to the bed the way she pinned him to the wall. Funny how it's all coming full circle, even if the most he could do is make it slightly more difficult for her to stand up.

It reminds him of the feeling he used to get looking over the rows and rows of chambers in the relaxation center, each holding a helpless, sleeping human—except this is more immediate, more gratifying, more personal. Here she is, the last human, the best human, pulling him onto herself, practically _inviting_ him to exert power over her.

It makes him feel like king of the mountain. It makes him feel like… the boss.

Of course, that illusion evaporates within seconds as she steadies him between her thighs, spreads her fingers, and sweeps over his entire outer casing.

"Wagh!"

Shorting out must have really done a number on his speech synthesizer, because when he finally squeezes out a coherent protest, it's a full octave _higher_ this time. "Okay, you know what, I did say I'd interface with you. I did say that. But here's the thing: it was all hypothetical _._ I don't know if you get what that means. See, I was over there, you were over here, we were in the heat of the moment and it was never meant to be an actual—OH!"

He jerks, becoming very, very still.

"That's… that's the port you're touching."

She runs the back of her nail across it, flicking gently over each tiny pin, and he's acutely aware of each corresponding internal component lighting up like a Christmas tree, making his plates quiver and his flashlight blink to life.

"Still touching it." His voice breaks. "Could you maybe just… _not_ touch it?"

After one last, fiendishly thorough pass over the metallic edge, she relents, sitting back against the wall and giving him what is most definitely a frowny face.

"Now, don't be mad, it's just that there's no need for all this touching right now and it's not nice. Well, it's kind of nice, it's just weird, and we've had enough weirdness to last a while, haven't we?"

The truth is, it's _really_ nice.

It's also the most frightening situation he's ever been in—more frightening than being swarmed by angry nanobots, more frightening than the _clunk_ that sounds whenever he detaches from the management rail… even more frightening than the moment they woke _her_ up.

Her fingers start creeping around the rods of his motion platform, tracing the cylindrical joints. He holds his faceplate perfectly still, because if he blinks the wrong way, he's sure her hand will be torn off like a ticket stub. All at once, then, the pleasant tickling sensation of her ministrations seems to retreat, to be replaced by that gruesome image.

"You know what," he stutters, "could we actually move to the _outside_ of me? Less machinery to catch yourself on. I'd rather this little brain-damaged make-believe interfacing game did not end in tragedy. I mean, it's fine if you want to imitate me, pretend you're gonna hack me, whatever—it's your party, but let's try to keep casualties to a minimum."

Her eyes narrow, and out of nowhere, quick as lightning, she scratches his port.

Through the sudden whine of feedback, he can't quite hear the deep, growly sound he makes—but he certainly feels it, rumbling through his plates. And if the way she plasters herself against him is any indication, she feels it too. Immobilized in the grip of her various limbs, he pulls his handles in and thrusts his eyeplate out against her, trying to push her away.

"God, what are you—"

She whimpers.

"What's _that?_ " he says, forgetting to struggle, forgetting her finger still lodged in his port. He wouldn't believe it if he hadn't felt the jump in her throat, the telltale buzz in her voicebox. "Was there something you wanted to _say?_ Did you want to say—"

She flicks his port hard with her fingernail. The impact rattles through him in skull-numbing waves, and as if to make manifest his inner reverberation, another groan rumbles out, even lower, shaking him from circuitboard to shell.

As the vibration dies away, her heartbeat is louder than ever, and now he can feel it pulsing in that slick, burning spot between her legs, pressed more and more fervently to the base of his core.

"If I didn't know any better, lady, I'd think you were actually _getting off_ on this. Getting off on your loyal teammate's discomfo—"

She mashes her impossibly warm mouth against him.

"That's—are you trying to lubricate me after all? Because I was just kidding. Mostly. And what you're doing isn't going to provide any substantial benefits, but _oh_."

There's a wet, spongy feeling trailing between the two shafts of his upper handle. It has to be her tongue; he's about as sure as he can be with his eye crammed against her breasts.

"Oh. Yeah," he sighs as she traces the seam between his inner and outer casings. "Like I said, insu—… insufficient lubrication… carry on."

His faceplate chooses this moment to spasm, emitting a single tiny spark. Both of them freeze as it sails harmlessly to the side.

"Careful! Careful, now. Don't get electrocuted, I couldn't afford to lose you right now."

Human saliva seems like the sort of thing the scientists might have forgotten to mention would kill him upon contact. Then again, he's lost count of the deadly stunts he's pulled today. Why the hell not?

Slowly, insistently, she traces wet circles around the ridge at the very base of his handle, first one side, then the other, finishing with a shuddering breath before she touches her warm forehead to his case, resting it there.

"Love, what are you _doing_ to me?" His voice is rough, muffled in her shirt. "This is almost worse than the plug. And by worse I do mean better."

That's the amazing thing—there isn't any data coming through her licks and flicks and scratches, and yet each one affects him more than the last. Maybe his system is just destabilized after the hack—a cold boot does always make him feel wobbly and knackered, and this one was particularly brutal—but who would've thought he could get so much out of the physical side of things, being gradually abused into a stupor by a collection of human body parts?

Whatever the technical reason, this weird game is getting out of hand. Every move Wheatley makes elicits a gasp from her, as if the juncture of her legs were a port and _he_ were the plug being rubbed against it the wrong way. He pushes his inner casing experimentally up and down, mimicking the way she moves on him.

Judging by how her entire body contracts around him, this appears to be the right thing to do. Her thighs seize him like a pair of clamps, burrowing him between her legs. As he keeps moving over and over in quick, smooth snaps, she arches her back and clutches at the sheets, making a sound like she's swallowing another whimper.

Finally free after what seems like hours of being trapped in her warm, damp embrace, he rolls his faceplate up to get a better look at her.

For a second, every process hangs, and his CPU feels cold.

Her head is thrown back against the nest of bedclothes, her dark hair escaping its tie in glossy-wet tendrils, and her face is aglow with the most staggeringly beautiful, complex expression she's ever made.

Her brow is drawn up in a picture of fervent pleasure, her eyelashes trembling on her flushed cheeks. In the well of her mouth, he can see glimpses of her teeth, one of them endearingly crooked. For some reason, it's this last tiny detail that really knocks him for a loop, and he has a sudden feeling like a screw somewhere being tightened.

"Could be just the angle, but that is a lovely face you're making," he chokes out. "I don't know why you can't make faces like that more often. You could be a regular face virtuoso if you just applied yourself a little. It's making me excited just looking at you."

She opens her eyes. When he sees the feverish cast to them, it strikes him that despite what he thought, those eyes have never looked stupid, or scrambled, or brain-damaged—only crystal clear, hot and bright as boiling water, burning away all obstacles and searing through all pretense.

He can't help but feel he's been reading her wrong the entire time, and no number of flashcards is bound to ever help.

Her hand forces his casing up and down in long, legato strokes, guiding him until he sustains the movement on his own. A moment later, her thumb reappears on the ridge in his side, rubbing in the same rhythm. The velvety-soft flesh of her thighs hugs the exposed frame of his gyroscope until he can feel the shape of each unyielding muscle beneath.

"That's just fine—hold me as tightly as you want, as tightly as you can—"

Pistons is the motion now, the rolling motion she makes with her cheek pressed against him, the repetition of her hands dragging circles around the inside of his hull, her body tossing him like a sea.

He feels her seizing up, her breath quickening exponentially. He shuts his eye, recalling the motion platform override that preceded the spectacular door-banging conclusion of the hack. After all they've gone through to reach this moment, he feels a twinge of the screw-tightening feeling again—why couldn't it be _him_ locking up, about to experience that ecstatic surge?

When it comes, it comes silently. She drives against him, her limbs like molten steel, each thrust mechanical and regular.

He feels her start to breathe again, first quickly, then slowing. She peels herself off him. Her eyes are so heavy, her hair glazed to her satiny forehead. As her hand finds the back of his motion platform, their gazes meet.

It's like they're looking at each other across some void, and the screw inside him threatens to strip its threads.

***

For all that commotion, she only sleeps for about an hour.

The first fifteen minutes, she isn't even sleeping at all, but shivering under the flimsy sheet. This abandoned part of the facility hasn't been heated for ages, even when the scientists were still around, and Wheatley, reclining against the edge of the pillow, thinks she looks colder alone under the sheet, her jumpsuit zipped to the chin, than she did on top of it with him. Of course, it's really nothing to do with the sheet itself. Just a matter of her body temperature spiraling back down to normal after their adventure in interfacing.

He has no biological obligations to attend to, but he keeps his eye closed to avoid blinking and jostling her, and to avoid looking too long at the dark corners of the room. Holding perfectly still is not in his nature, but as he's afflicted with sore handles and a very chafed socket, it's worth a try at this point. Nor is it in his nature to stay quiet—he doesn't want to wake her, but pressure is building behind his voice as language directives pile up.

Now that he's free of mouths and fingers and everyone's been electrocuted to their satisfaction, he has the time and mental resources to wonder: what the hell just happened?

Did he win at something? Did he lose? If he defeated and subdued the receptacle—which he definitely did—and she'd been reenacting the struggle, receiving a similar reward… does that mean _he's_ just been defeated?

Shit.

This team is always going to be lopsided. He knew that starting out. That's how it's always been with humans; that's how it's always going to be. He can't work with a human without both of them muscling to get the drop on each other, and chances are she's no different. Even in the middle of the most intimate team-building exercise, she's always the one flicking ports, never the one being flicked. She's the one grabbing his handles, solving his problems, and cleaning up his messes. Even when she's underneath him, she's always on top.

In another lifetime, another universe, maybe, they'd be equals.

That gives him an idea. A terrible, magnetic idea that sets his CPU to overheating, and he can't stay silent any longer.

"If only… if only I could get you to stay here, in this room with the receptacle right outside, and do this over and over," he murmurs.

Yeah, right.

 _"That's_ a laugh, isn't it, love?" He sighs. "Let's face it, I've got little to no horsepower. Nothing but brainpower. And even with that, I could try to convince you, but if you weren't one hundred percent in, you'd just walk away without me. _Over_ me, probably. Little steamroller."

What a silly idea, now that he's heard himself say it.

"It's not like I'd want to stay, anyway. Of course. I'm bigger than that. We've got a facility to escape, a crazy tyrant to thwart. Certain death to defy."

He studies her eyelashes.

"But… man alive, if I _did_ find a way… a way to make you stay, to make you do what _I_ wanted for a while…"

Her eyes pop open, and he segues smoothly into a throat-clearing sound: "AHHHHRNG!"

Without a second's hesitation, she wobbles up to her feet, pushing him aside with the tangle of sheets, and starts walking the perimeter of the room—pacing, really.

"I… did you have a good sleep?"

Her head jerks around and he can see her eyes darting wildly, struggling to focus on him.

"Bit awkward, this," he manages, blinking away. It's embarrassing, having to face her suddenly in the midst of his unkind plotting and planning. She couldn't have heard him saying any of that, though. Because she was asleep. Fast asleep.

As she stalks around the room, jabbing at disconnected keyboards and opening cracked cabinets, her boots crunching over broken glass, he begins, "You know… I was just saying to myself, I've been meaning to tell you what a stunner you are. That's why I picked you to wake up, in fact. Because you were such a stunner." He coughs. "Well, no, actually it was because you're the last human alive in the place, but that doesn't change the fact that you're a pretty lady."

At this revelation, she turns to him, and just as he feared, her eyes are empty again—empty as water that never boiled or steamed.

She turns the tap on, but nothing comes out except some sort of brown jelly.

"Seriously. If I were a human… uch. On second thought, let's not go there. How about this: if _you_ were a machine, maybe a core, maybe some other piece of technology… I'd interface your bloody _brains_ out. On the daily. Could do it parallel, serial, or any way you'd like."

She screws open a green glass bottle and upends it over a roll of gauze, but it's empty. It goes clattering into the sink, and the gauze goes into the pocket of her jumpsuit, and only then does she deign to shoot him another look. There's that tiny almost-eyeroll. They're back to square one, apparently.

Perhaps he'd better take a different tack.

"And then I'd take you to see my absolute favorite place in the facility. Actually, swap that around: we'd go there first. I do respect you, after all, definitely… heaps of respect. Ha ha. Still, the point is, there would be gratuitous data transfer, before, after, possibly during if you're up for it."

This idea seems to amuse her; a little upward quirk appears at the corner of her mouth. He dives for that dimple like it's his only hope, elaborating quickly: "You know what? We could still do that, I guess, nothing stopping us. Let's do that! First thing after we take _her_ down. She hits the ground, bam, you grab me, we're in the lift to the surface, and we'll just make a quick stop there on the way. It's a date. You know what it is, that place? It's… THE ROOM WHERE ALL THE ROBOTS SCREAM AT YOU! Joking, joking, only joking," he adds quickly, seeing her mouth open slightly in horror. "But it's actually not too different from that—just, the noise they make is a bit more pleasing to the ear. I think you'll love it, it's a very classy place."

As she scoops him up against her waist, gripping him by the handle, she does smile at him, but it's a bit of an indulgent smile. Empty, like those eyes. Not quite what he was aiming for.

She stands under the fluorescent panel for a moment, and he knows she's looking at the bed. It looks different from before, its sterile tidiness now fluffed into a nest, bearing the imprint of their little detour. How long will it lie in this state, undisturbed, unseen?

The flickering light leaves her eyes in shadow. No telling what she's thinking.

Her hand hovers over the gun, still lying patiently on the sink counter—and then she turns on her heel and slams through the door, leaving it behind.

"NO! WAIWAIWAIWAIT THE PORTAL GUN DON'T LET IT SHUT WHAT ARE YOU— awww, what are you doing? You let it shut, that's great, we're gonna have to do it all— all… over again. Oh."

Holding him over one knee, she pins both his handlebars back as far as they can go.

And she says, "Oops."


End file.
